War Stories: 'You finding any mines, men?'

Dick Schermerhorn grew up in the Adirondacks in New York, studied forestry at college and joined the Army after graduating in 1943.

An amphibious engineer, he served briefly in Italy and then trained in England with the 531st Engineer Shore Regiment for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.

The married, 22-year-old corporal was on a ship in the English Channel early on June 6, 1944.

Today, the 91-year-old former east Allentown resident who now lives in South Whitehall Township remembers D-Day.

As we got close to Utah Beach, we went down these rope ladders into the landing craft. It was still dark. We were packed in like sardines, 35 to 40 of us.

There were ships as far as you could see, aircraft flying over and naval vessels were bombing the Normandy coast. It was unreal. The noise was out of this world.

We didn't know what we faced. Anybody tells you he's not scared, there's something wrong with him. There was a medical officer on the landing craft with me, and I happened to turn around and look at him and his face was as white as a sheet.

I wasn't seasick, but a lot of the guys were.

We had impregnated clothing to prevent poison gas. We had gas masks. I had a mine detector, waterproofed. They used to tell us engineers to let the infantry do the fighting, but we still had to carry these heavy M-1 rifles.

The assault boat dropped us off about 50 yards from shore about 7 a.m. We were getting fired on, but not to the extent of our buddies on Omaha Beach.

When the ramp came down, some guys were hit. You could see the machine-gun bullets hitting the water. I jumped in with the mine detector; the water was up to my neck. My buddy who worked with me was a short fella, so he just hung onto me.

There were guys dead in the water because some of our landing craft were hit by German fire.

I got to the beach and saw a man with his leg off. He was alive but in shock. I looked at his dog tag and he was from New York state, like me. That shook me up. There was no question he didn't survive, because there were no medics around.

A group of us tried to get assembled. The main object of the 531st was to establish a beachhead. In other words, our thrust was not to make a landing and push the Germans and keep moving. We were there to make it easier for troops that were coming in. We had Bangalore torpedoes to blow up entanglements, heavy equipment, ducks [amphibious trucks], different kinds of plows.

Our first job was to work minefields. The Germans had the Schu mine: If you stepped on it, it would take your foot off. Then they had mines that would explode waist-high and throw off ball bearings.

Mostly, we saw tank mines.

If you walked over a tank mine, you wouldn't set it off because you're not heavy enough, unless it was booby-trapped. We didn't have time to disarm all of them. Tank mines had handles. We would fasten something on the handle and pull the mine out. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, nothing would happen. You got back a ways, because if it was booby-trapped, it would go off.

The mine detectors were not nearly as sophisticated as they are now. They picked up every bolt, screw, nut. This fella from Clearfield, out past State College, he was my buddy — Charlie Panisetti. We were a team. We'd take turns. One of us sweeps and the other guy probes. When you'd get a reading on the detector you're holding, the other guy has a bayonet, and he'd dig to find out what it was.

We were assigned an area to clear mines. There was a path we went up, and a wall there. Bullets were hitting it. You'd hear a ping as somebody was shooting at you. We were getting artillery fire, and every once in a while a Messerschmitt or some other plane would fly over.

Practically in the beginning, we were sweeping for mines and my buddy saw this dead paratrooper lying there, and he said, "Dick, get that knife for me." So I'm trying to get this knife off the paratrooper's belt and I happened to turn and see [Brig. Gen.] Teddy Roosevelt Jr. He's all alone like he was out for a Sunday walk. I got up quick because he could accuse you of going through a guy's pocket.

Roosevelt comes up and says, "You finding any mines, men?" I said, "No sir, not at this time." Then he said, "Dammit, I thought there'd be millions of them."

There were, but we weren't into the thick of them yet.

He just walked on. I ended up clearing maybe a hundred mines that day.

Last time I saw Roosevelt, frogmen were blowing up obstacles the Germans had in the water to prevent boats from coming in. The frogmen put up a purple flare when they had a charge, and you were supposed to hit the deck. This one time, lying prone, I looked up and here's Roosevelt standing there looking around.

Later, a German 88 mm shell landed in our medic station and we had a hundred percent casualties in our medical detachment. Even with all the shelling by our naval vessels and bombardment by our air corps, we still had to send up ground personnel to take out the concrete emplacements the Germans had.